News

Dali L Yang’s critique of China’s response in the early days of the Covid pandemic is thoroughgoing if academic, while poet Liao Yiwu’s account mixes fact and fiction to extraordinary effect
Cast your mind back, if you will, to the beginning of the pandemic, before the World Health Organization had coined the term Covid-19. Back then, it was the “Wuhan virus”, a mysterious pathogen from a city that few people outside China had visited.
On 12 January 2020, China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published the virus’s genome on an international database, permitting scientists anywhere in the world to see that it was a coronavirus closely related to Sars – the pathogen that had caused a mini-pandemic in 2002-2004.

Protectionism in the form of tariffs is justified but the focus will be on whether Beijing retaliates
The global economy is fragmenting and a new era of protectionism has dawned. Dreams by free marketeers of a frictionless world in which goods and services moved seamlessly from country to country are dead.
That was the clear message from Joe Biden’s decision last week to target China with a range of new, much on electric vehicles and a range of other products crucial to sectors seen by the White House as vital to the future health of the US economy and to national security.

Southern California Asian American Art,” a multi-media art exhibition currently on view at TAG Gallery, Los Angeles (May 4–24), ...

When “We the People” is bandied about — a phrase meant to represent all  Americans regardless of the differences among us — too often it is drowned out by taunts of “Go back where you came from,” or ...

Friends and analysts say Lai’s tough upbringing in a working-class family has prepared him well for his next opponent: China
The house itself is a modest, two-storey dwelling on a larger parcel of picturesque land. Mist floats down from the jungled hills behind, settling in the narrow lane that winds towards the rundown remnants of a mine.
The only people there on the day the Guardian visits are curious tourists. They are there for one thing: to see the family home of Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s next president.

Cannes film festivalThe 20-year failed romance between a singer and a dodgy music promoter becomes the vehicle for director Jia Zhangke’s latest exploration of China’s momentous recent history
As so often in the past, Chinese film-maker Jia Zhangke swims down into an ocean of sadness and strangeness; his new film is a mysterious quest narrative with a dynamic, westernised musical score. It tells a human story of a failed romance spanning 20 years, and brings this into parallel with a larger panorama: the awe-inspiring scale of millennial change that has transformed China in the same period, a futurist fervour for quasi-capitalist innovation that has turned out to co-exist with some very old-fashioned state coercion.
Caught by the Tides reflects with a kind of numb astonishment at all the novelties that the country has been required to welcome, all the vast upheavals for which the people have had to make sacrifices. The film shows us the mobster-businessmen who have done well in modern China, the patriotic ecstasy of Beijing getting picked to host the 2008 Olympic Games, the creation of the Three Gorges hydroelectric dam which meant so much unacknowledged pain for the displaced communities. (This latter was the subject of Jia’s in 2006.) And finally of course there is the misery of the Covid lockdown.

Chinese automakers are entering markets all over the world, while American companies like GM and Ford are focusing on North America.

Western leaders looking for signs that the Chinese leader used his influence on President Vladimir V. Putin to end the war in Ukraine are likely to be disappointed.

News avatars are proliferating on social media and experts say they will spread as the technology becomes more accessible
The news presenter has a deeply uncanny air as he delivers a partisan and pejorative message in Mandarin: Taiwan’s outgoing president, Tsai Ing-wen, is as effective as limp spinach, her period in office beset by economic under performance, social problems and protests.
“Water spinach looks at water spinach. Turns out that water spinach isn’t just a name,” says the presenter, in an extended metaphor about Tsai being “Hollow Tsai” – a pun related to the Mandarin word for water spinach.

American automakers and their Chinese rivals are heading in different directions. Able to produce far more cars than they can sell in China, Chinese companies like BYD are entering markets all over ...

Sean Miyashiro, founder and CEO of 88rising, has been a key driver in globalizing the music scene for Asian artists. The company is a popular musical platform and record label for Asian American and ...

May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, and Shreve Memorial Library has tons of fun programs planned to celebrate the diverse cultures of Asian American and Pacific Islanders. Commemorated each ...